There are definitely irksome components in this microbudget drama set largely inside a creaking Cadillac, but there are redeeming features as well. In the debit column, there are way too many vaguely admiring montages that show the sibling central characters Jake (Scott Monahan, also the film’s director and producer) and John (Dakota Loesch, also the film’s screenwriter) ingesting a pharmacopeia of drugs, from “roxy” to heroin. Likewise, a lot of the naturalistic dialogue is a tad repetitive, like the long debates over whether they should sell all the drugs they have stolen (currently hidden in teddy bears in the trunk of the Caddy) in Los Angeles or Anchorage, Alaska. In the latter city, their illicit haul would fetch a much higher price – but only if they don’t neck it all first on the way.
A lot rides on whether viewers can find these two crazy, mixed-up twentysomething kids interesting or sympathetic enough to make it worth riding along with them for a journey that takes a very wrong turn two-thirds of the way in. A passing reminiscence about their late mother “towards the end” when she always wore a headscarf, suggests post-traumatic grief nibbling away at their psyches in the background, but does that really excuse both men’s tendency towards sudden, pointless violence?
